Everyone is going crazy over French leader Emmanuel Macron’s blatant lie at the United Nations today that Hamas has “never been active in the West Bank”—Judea and Samaria.
Yes, the statement is a total lie. Hamas has operated networks and carried out terrorist attacks in Judea and Samaria for decades.
But Macron’s remark is a sideshow.
Forget Hamas. What about the Palestinian Authority that supports terror, educates its children to kill Jews via school textbooks and television programs? But the cherry on top ignored by the Western world is that the entire Palestinian national movement that Western leaders insist Israel must recognize and reward with a state!
Because there is a history behind that movement that Western capitals totally ignore. Not because it is obscure. Because it is inconvenient.
Ion Mihai Pacepa was not an Israeli partisan. He was acting chief of Communist Romania’s foreign intelligence service, the highest-ranking Soviet-bloc KGB intelligence officer ever to defect to the West. He handled the PLO account. He saw the files. He moved the money.
Pacepa wrote:
“The PLO was dreamt up by the KGB, which had a penchant for ‘liberation’ organizations.”
He placed it in a pattern. The National Liberation Army of Bolivia. FARC. The Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Liberation brands manufactured to convert local wars into anti-Western “anti-colonial” struggles.
Then he described the founding moment:
“In 1964 the first PLO Council, consisting of 422 Palestinian representatives handpicked by the KGB, approved the Palestinian National Charter, a document that had been drafted in Moscow. The Palestinian National Covenant and the Palestinian Constitution were also born in Moscow, with the help of Ahmed Shuqairy, a KGB influence agent who became the first PLO chairman.”
That is the claim. Not “the Soviets later helped.” The charter itself, he said, was a Moscow product.
And then there was Yasser Arafat.
Pacepa said he was given the KGB’s personal file on the man who would become the face of “Palestine”:
“Arafat was an Egyptian bourgeois turned into a devoted Marxist by KGB foreign intelligence. The KGB had trained him at its Balashikha special-operations school east of Moscow and in the mid-1960s decided to groom him as the future PLO leader.”
Then the biographical reconstruction:
“First, the KGB destroyed the official records of Arafat’s birth in Cairo, replacing them with fictitious documents saying that he had been born in Jerusalem and was therefore a Palestinian by birth.”
Read that again. The future international embodiment of an “ancient Palestinian nation” was born in Cairo. According to the highest-ranking Eastern Bloc intelligence defector to reach the West, Soviet intelligence erased the Egyptian record and issued a Jerusalem legend so he could be sold as “indigenous.”
Pacepa went further.
“High-minded idealism held no mass-appeal in the Arab world, so the KGB remolded Arafat as a rabid anti-Zionist. They also selected a ‘personal hero’ for him. the Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini.”
The same mufti who allied with Hitler.
Pacepa also described the operational pipeline. Before he defected, he said, he was “responsible for giving Arafat about $200,000 in laundered cash every month throughout the 1970s” and sent “two cargo planes to Beirut a week, stuffed with uniforms and supplies.” Other Soviet-bloc services did the same. In 1972, he wrote, the Kremlin put Arafat “high on all Soviet bloc intelligence services’ priority list.” Bucharest’s assignment was image-laundering: make Washington treat a terrorist as a statesman.
Yuri Andropov, then KGB chairman, told Pacepa the larger purpose in language that should still be on every Western desk:
“We needed to instill a Nazi-style hatred for the Jews throughout the Islamic world, and to turn this weapon of the emotions into a terrorist bloodbath against Israel and its main supporter, the United States.”
And:
“We would make Arafat into just such a figurehead and gradually move the PLO closer to power and statehood.”
Pacepa’s every operational detail cannot be independently audited decades later. Mitrokhin’s notes confirm Soviet contact, funding, and frustration with Arafat’s unreliability; they do not independently prove every Pacepa sentence about the 1964 council. Fine. Historians can argue footnotes.
What cannot be waved away is the documented Soviet project: take an Arab-Israeli war, recode it as national liberation, recode Jews as colonialists, recode terrorism as resistance, and recode a Cairo-born revolutionary as the authentic son of an invented nation.
That is not a theory about whether Arabs lived in the land. Of course some did, Muslims and Christians, for centuries. But the vast majority of Arabs migrated into Ottoman and Mandate Palestine from Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Transjordan and farther afield in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, drawn by work, security, and the economic boom that Zionist settlement and British administration produced. Historians still fight over the numbers. That fight is real. But there was no historic people called “palestinians”. Hence Arabs are called Arabs, because they originate from Arabia!
Rather, it was the Soviet Union that capitalized on the existing hatred for Jews in Israel to create the “Palestinian” national identity as the organizing political identity of those Arabs, to industrialize into a Cold War “national liberation” brand aimed at erasing Jewish sovereignty and weakening the West.
Our first Pulse of Israel conference in Jerusalem, in June 2023, months before the October 7 invasion, was built around this exact warning: world Jewry had to recognize that modern Palestinian national identity was invented as an antisemitic strategy against the Jews. Any Jew giving the “palestinian” identity political credence, or backing a two-state solution on its terms, was not neutrality. It is direct support for an antisemitic agenda that endangers Jews everywhere. October 7 proved it. The invasion/massacre was followed by a global explosion of Jew-hatred that makes sense only if the “Palestinian cause,” as now constructed, is understood for what it is: not a dispute over borders, but a campaign against the Jews.
Before the mid-1960s, the dominant frames were Arab, Muslim, Syrian, southern Syrian, Jordanian. “Palestine” was a geographic designation the British used; Jews in the Mandate called themselves Palestinians too. After Moscow’s liberation template was bolted onto the conflict, a new people was proclaimed, and a Cairo-born operative was issued the birth certificate.
Even PLO officials later said the quiet part out loud. Zuheir Mohsen, a senior PLO figure, told a Dutch interviewer in 1977:
“The Palestinian people do not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity…. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people.”
That is not an Israeli talking point. That is the movement describing its own instrument.
The Soviet genius was never that it invented human beings. It invented a political narrative and then flooded the UN, campuses, churches, and newsrooms with it.
Take a war between Jews returning to their ancestral land and surrounding Arab states that rejected partition and lost.
Repackage it as natives versus Western colonists.
Turn the Jews, the people with the longest continuous civilizational, linguistic, religious and archaeological connection to Judea, Jerusalem and the Land of Israel, into foreign “settlers.”
Turn Israel’s defensive wars into “imperialism.”
Turn airplane hijackings, school massacres and suicide bombings into “resistance.”
Turn the PLO into a national-liberation movement.
Turn Arafat from an Egyptian-born Marxist trainee into the living relic of an ancient dispossessed nation.
The operation worked. Decades later, presidents, prime ministers, NGOs and editorial boards repeat its vocabulary as if it were geology.
Which brings us back to the Palestinian Authority.
Western governments still sell a comforting split: Hamas is the terrorist organization; the PA is the moderate address. That split is a diplomatic convenience, not a description of political culture.
The PA uses international funding, for years, for a pay-for-slay payment system that pays salaries to jihadi terrorists and their families scaled to the number of murdered Jews. Education is not a secret either. The European Parliament has repeatedly flagged antisemitism, jihad, martyrdom and the erasure of Israel in PA and UNRWA-linked materials, but still continues on fund the textbooks!
Former Labor MK Einat Wilf, not of the Israeli right, has spent years saying the West refuses the real subject. In her book ‘The War of Return’, she and Adi Schwartz argue that the whole Palestinian national identity is focused on destroying Israel.
That is the conversation.
Macron wants the world discussing whether Hamas operates in Judea and Samaria.
It does.
Now suppose Hamas vanished tomorrow.
Would Palestinian institutions teach the next generation that the Jewish people have returned permanently to their indigenous homeland?
Would the demand to move millions of descendants of 1948 “refugees” into Haifa, Jaffa, Acre and the rest of sovereign Israel be dropped?
Would politics turn toward building a society instead of continuing the war against Jewish existence?
Those are the only questions that matter.
And there is a still more uncomfortable one Western leaders will not touch:
How much of the framework they now treat as sacred history was assembled, branded and internationalized in the Cold War by a Soviet regime that understood political warfare better than any government in Europe understands it now?
Don’t take an op-ed’s word for it.
Read Pacepa.
Read Arafat’s actual birthplace.
Read Soviet relations with the PLO.
Read what PLO officials said in Arabic when they thought the West was not listening.
Read the PA curriculum.
Read the pay-for-slay ledgers.
Read October 7 as ideology executed, not as a weather event.
So yes, call out Macron’s false statement about Hamas.
Then stop pretending that is the story.
The story is what the Palestinian national movement was built to do, who helped build it, and how a supposedly civilized West still recites a Jew-hating narrative Moscow helped write.
The good news is older than that lie.
The Jewish people have survived more than two thousand years of exile and persecution. Even with Jew-hatred rising again, we have never been stronger, or better positioned, to defend ourselves, to serve humanity, and to fulfill our God-given mission as a nation living sovereign once again in our indigenous, ancestral, Biblical homeland.
Strengthen your faith. Our future is bright.
Macron, Hamas and the Soviet Union invented “palestinian” people will be footnotes in the history books. Yet the Jewish people back as sovereign in Israel? We will have a rebuilt third Temple, fulfilling our mission of spreading goodness, morality and godliness to the world from Zion, as we are destined to do.
And stay with me at the Pulse of Israel for the truth. Share it.
